Category: competition

I’ve played plenty of board games in my life. I’m not (only) talking about Monopoly.

I went to Cambridge (to visit, very sadly, not to study) in 2003. I found an awesome board game store and tried to buy Diplomacy. The incredibly wise assistant basically forced me to buy Settlers of Catan before he would allow me to buy Diplomacy.

About Settlers of Catan

I have played hundreds of hours of Settlers, and recently gave Diplomacy away never having played it. I still believe it’s an awesome game. (Strategy, relationships, IQ and EQ, competition and a little backstabbing. What’s not to like?) However, it requires having enough people, the right sort of people. enough time (a weekend apparently is ideal) and ideally a couple people who have played before because it is complicated.

Now, Settlers has plenty of scope for tension as it is. I kicked my best friend out of my flat once after a kingmaking incident. I’ve had arguments with significant others over games. And this is Settlers, not Diplomacy.

Credit Life regulations have been live for long enough now that insurers are starting to feel the impact and the shake-up of amongst industry players is starting to emerge.

There have been plenty of debate around the regulations, in part because of the dramatic financial and operational impact they will have, and partly because of how imperfectly worded they are and the scope for interpretation.

I’ll be posting about this more in the coming days.

Basing the premium on initial or outstanding balance

First, a real anomaly is the ability for insurers to charge the capped premium rate either on initial loan balance or on the declining outstanding balance.

…is an arrangement in which a bank and an insurance company form a partnership so that the insurance company can sell its products to the bank’s client base. This partnership arrangement can be profitable for both companies. Banks can earn additional revenue by selling the insurance products, while insurance companies are able to expand their customer bases without having to expand their sales forces or pay commissions to insurance agents or brokers.

Bancassurance has been a major part of European and Asian insurance markets and, for a time, was presumed to be the future of insurance distribution in most countries around the world.

There is plenty more to the story than just manufacturing increasing in the US – it also includes an historical perspective on the sources of labour in the textile industry over the last two centuries.

The relevance for me and South Africa is – even with our 40% duties on imported textiles, why are we still shedding jobs? In the US, it’s been a desire for higher quality, more reliable quality, shorter turnaround times, cheaper transport costs and a growing discomfort with safety conditions in Asia.

The higher average incomes in the US also make price less of a overriding factor than in South Africa. The COSATU t shirts that were made in China at least once is a clear reminder of how cost impacts buying decisions above almost all else in big parts of our economy. I don’t know whether the quality of our production and the appreciation for buying locally made products is great enough locally yet. The NY Times article spend several paragraphs talking about the need for strong English and Maths skills. We’re still struggling with our legacy of broken education even while we fail current learners. None of this helps to take advantage of these trends.

Manufacturing growth in the US and other developed markets is also driven by increased automation. Higher real wage are less critical when automation in eras decreasing the amount of labour required. Possibly counterintuitively, this increases the demand for labour in developed countries even while decreasing global demand for labour.

Wages for cut-and-sew jobs, the core of the apparel industry’s remaining work force, have been rising fast — increasing 13.2 percent on an inflation-adjusted basis from 2007 to 2012

If you look at a graph of the share of US GDP that goes to labour compared to capital, it’s been a steady decrease for decades. I can only imagine the same is true in South Africa. The increased use of automation (including new robots that work more interactively with humans in auto plants) may drive this even further.

So is this a story that bodes well for South Africa? We should be a low (lower than the US and Europe anyway) wage producer so developed market manufacturing should hurt our export industry. Given that we import textiles from China, should we maintain hope – against all experience of the last two decades – of regaining a meaningful textile industry? Or do we need to recognize that Africa should be our biggest export area and we should leverage our proximity, both geographical and cultural, and focus on our competitive advantages over the Chinese? Where is our Industrial Policy in any of this?

Michael Porter’s Five Forces are just as relevant today. If you have intense competition, with plenty of threats from substitute and many competitors you’re margins are on a one-way trip to negative.

The question for me is, should financial services be any different? How different can you really make the products, services and customer experience? Apple has done it where other computer manufacturers can’t see a way, so maybe it is possible in FS.

Should South Africa import Chinese television sets? Your answer to this question depends probably on your education.

If you were university educated in South Africa, you are likely to be in the market at various times in your life for a large LED backlit LCD panel with a high refresh rate and more HDMI inputs than you will ever need. You will also quite likely have a market-oriented, Anglo-Saxon view of government’s role in industrial policy and international trade. Thus you would probably say “yes, import cheap TVs from China so I can buy a cheap TV and not pay for inefficient local firms to manufacturer expensive, inferior TVs.”

If you are a TV snob, you will still want free imports of Chinese TVs to keep the prices down of competing, but fancier Sony and LG models from Japan and Korea.

If you are a little cynical, you might say South Africa could never have the manufacturing capability and scale to produce all the components and assemble them into a modern LCD TV. That’s not actually the debate I ant to pursue now, so in that case let’s say the alternative would be to locally assemble sets made with significant local components, even if the LCD panel itself were imported. Of course, the reason South Africa doesn’t have the scale to produce the panels themselves at the moment is a function of industrial policy decisions decades go. There is no absolute reason we couldn’t have that capability. But, that debate is related but separate post. Continue reading “Should South Africa import Chinese TVs?”

The article does understate the problem that Germany’s success is significantly export driven – not everyone can export for obvious reasons.

Also, the author notes that consumption has grown more slowly than economic growth without understanding that is exactly the source of an export-encouraged boom. Growth in consumption will also grow imports!

Some of the issues may have merit, but this struck me as particularly troubling:

According to the act, it is unfair when a consumer is discriminated against on the grounds of age.

Our constitution explicitly allows discrimination on actuarially sound rating factors that have both a statistical and causal link. This is how insurance is South Africa still uses underwriting to select homogenous groups of risks and to limit anti-selection by policyholders. If widespread anti-selection were to occur, then life insurance would not be viable.

Medical Schemes in South Africa have only very limited underwriting options in order to provide as many citizens as possible with fair health coverage. “Late joiners” are charged a premium since they haven’t contributed to the societal risk pool since they were most healthy and therefore haven’t paid “their fair share”. This has to do with a specifically identified risk rather than general discrimination based on age. These restrictions are important to maintain the solvency and viability of medical schemes.

Some schemes prevent women who fall pregnant within nine months of joining the scheme from claiming for the pregnancy even though they pay full premiums

This point is more tricky, but it does again reflect a misunderstanding. “Full premiums” on an actuarial sound basis have probably not been paid, since the fair premium for a member who joins just to get pregnancy benefits and hasn’t contributed at other times would be much higher than the premium that is charged. This one is a little more grey and while I feel the rules are entirely fair, they may not be viewed that way by a particular judge on a particular day.

Some schemes require that members give three months’ notice when terminating their membership, whereas the act deems 20 business days to be reasonable

This might reflect the desire to not have members leave a scheme immediately after having utilized the maximum benefit available to them before joining another scheme. I don’t know how much of this behavior would ever happen, so this might also ultimately be changed.

Many schemes don’t enforce the allowed waiting periods for members joining. If some of these other changes were to be made, I would expect these provisions would be more regularly used. Of course, that is another of the problems cited with medical schemes arising from the CPA.

All in all, we may see some changes, but by and large these comments reflect a lack of appreciation for the actuarial realities of managing a health scheme with community rating.